Miracles and Sacrilege: Robert Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in HollywoodMiracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ‘business’ unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ‘sacreligious.’ Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court’s decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 76
... Protestants argued that Catholics could never be fully American because they continued to bow to a foreign prince.1 Conspiracies were periodically alleged between Rome and its 'docile' immigrants to take over America, culminating in a ...
... Protestants , either their immediate Anglo - Irish landlords , or the English across St George's Channel , some of whom ... Protestantism , even by de- mands to renounce the Virgin Mary as a condition for getting soup . Not surprisingly ...
... Protestantism or agnosticism. Among the 'Americanist' notions Leo now excoriated were 'the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject' and 'the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any ...
... Protestants and secularists. That the evangelical Catholicism envisioned by self-declared Americanist intellectuals like Hecker might offer some new, positive, and distinctively Catholic direction for the United States, and even the ...
... Protestantism was not so strange, since many of those who came from southern Italy, the so-called Mezzogiorno, practised forms of Catholicism so disdained by America's Irish priests that the first visit to an Irish parish church would ...
Contents
9 | |
20 | |
37 | |
55 | |
Johnson_2153_072ps | 72 |
Johnson_2153_087ps | 87 |
Johnson_2153_103ps | 103 |
Johnson_2153_118ps | 118 |
Johnson_2153_203ps | 203 |
Johnson_2153_216ps | 216 |
Johnson_2153_229ps | 229 |
Johnson_2153_242ps | 242 |
Johnson_2153_283ps | 283 |
Johnson_2153_307ps | 307 |
Johnson_2153_322ps | 322 |
Johnson_2153_334ps | 334 |
Johnson_2153_128ps | 128 |
Johnson_2153_137ps | 137 |
Johnson_2153_155ps | 155 |
Johnson_2153_184ps | 184 |
Johnson_2153_361ps | 361 |
Johnson_2153_445ps | 445 |
479 | |